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The Lexicon of Prohibition
Merry Christmas, and welcome to the 43rd issue of the Lists of Note newsletter. You can support this project by becoming a paid subscriber, or by donating, or by purchasing a copy of the Lists of Note book, the last remaining Special Editions of which I’m currently selling at half price. Huge thanks for reading Lists of Note this year, and may your festive break be stress-free.
In 1927, at the height of the United States’ 13-year, nationwide ban on the sale and import of alcoholic beverages, one of the country’s leading literary critics, Edmund Wilson, compiled and published a list that he titled, The Lexicon of Prohibition. It was a list of terms for drunkenness, arranged, he explained, “in order of the degrees of intensity of the conditions which they represent, beginning with the mildest stages and progressing to the more serious,” and it read as follows.
lit
squiffy
oiled
lubricated
owled
edged
jingled
piffed
piped
sloppy
woozy
happy
half screwed
half cooked
half shot
half seas over
fried
stewed
boiled
bent
sprung
scrooched
jazzed
jagged
canned
corked
corned
potted
hooted
slopped
tanked
tight
full
wet
high
horseback
liquored
pickled
ginned
shicker (Yiddish)
spifflicated
primed
organized
featured
pie-eyed
cock-eyed
wall-eyed
glassy-eyed
bleary-eyed
hoary-eyed
over the Bay
four sheets in the wind
crocked
loaded
leaping
screeching
lathered
plastered
soused
bloated
polluted
saturated
stinko
blind
stiff
under the table
wapsed down
paralyzed
ossifed
out like a light
passed out cold
embalmed
buried
blotto
lit up like the sky
sit up like the commonwealth
lit up like a Christmas tree
lit up like a store window
lit up like a church
fried to the hat
slopped to the ears
stewed to the gills
boiled as an owl
full as a tick
loaded for bear
loaded to the muzzle
loaded to the plimsoll mark
to have a bun on
to have a slant on
to have a skate on
to have a snootfull
to have a skinful
to draw a blank
to pull a shut-eye
to pull a Daniel Boone
to have a rubber drink
to have a hangover
to have a head
to have the jumps to have the shakes
to have the zings
to have the heeby-jeebies
to have the screaming-meemies
to have the whoops and jingles
to burn with a low blue flame
Extracted from Lists of Note, edited by Shaun Usher. Originally from American Earthquake: A Documentary of the Twenties and Thirties. Copyright © 1958 by Edmund Wilson. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House.